Today The Pirate Bay celebrates its 10th anniversary. Founded in 2003 by a collective of hackers and activists, the small Swedish BitTorrent tracker grew to become a global icon for online piracy. We'll take a look at how it all came to be, from a tiny community running on a 1.3GHz machine with 256MB RAM, to Hollywood's arch rival serving millions of users from a cloud-hosted hydra.

During the summer of 2003 The Pirate Bay was founded by Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån.

Piratbyrån, which translates to Bureau of Piracy, was formed by political activists and hackers in the early 2000s, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral and power structures.

The group’s members were all friends of friends and in common with The Pirate Bay, there was virtually no structure.

One of the group’s unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyrån. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw it fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information.

“At the time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay,” Peter Sunde later recalled.

The site first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM. This one machine, which belonged to Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), kept the site online and included a fully operational tracker.

The Pirate Bay server

It didn’t take long before more server power was needed to keep the site and tracker from collapsing due to a growing number of visitors.

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was coordinating a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also noticed that it was not only Scandinavians developing an interest in their site.

In fact, by then 80% of their users came from other parts of the world. Because of increasing worldwide popularity The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages during July 2005.

The Pirate Bay before the redesign

Due to these changes, The Pirate Bay grew even faster, and the number of peers tracked by the site grew to 2,500,000 by the end of 2005.

In the meantime, Piratbyrån had distanced itself from the site as a group, but continued to share the Kopimi lifestyle throughout the world until 2007. The Pirate Bay sailed on independently and continued to be operated by an unorganized collection of individuals.

Pirate Bay’s increase in traffic didn’t go unnoticed by the entertainment industries. Copyright holders started to send out takedown notices, which were often mocked by the site’s founders. Eventually, however, The Pirate Bay got raided following pressure from Hollywood and the USA.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the Pirate Bay’s servers.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

The site went down for three days, only to reappear at a new hosting facility. The site’s operators were not impressed and renamed the site “The Police Bay” complete with a new logo shooting cannon balls at Hollywood. A few days later this logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.

The raid brought the site into the mainstream press, not least due to its amazing three-day resurrection. All this publicity resulted in a huge traffic spike for TPB, exactly the opposite effect Hollywood had hoped for.

Logos after the raid

Despite a criminal investigation into the site’s founders The Pirate Bay kept growing and growing. In early 2009, more than two years after the Swedish investigation was finalized, the three co-founders and businessman financier Carl Lundstrom went on trial.

April 2009 the four were found guilty of assisting copyright infringement. They were sentenced to one year in jail and fines totaling $3,620,000. During the appeal in 2010 the prison sentences were reduced, but the fines increased to more than $6.5 million. Thus far, two of the four have served their sentences.

The Pirate Bay’s assets, meanwhile, were transferred to the mysterious Seychelles-based company Reservella which continues to operate the site up until today.

Under new ownership several major technical changes occurred. In the fall of 2009 the infamous BitTorrent tracker was taken offline, turning The Pirate Bay into a torrent indexing site.

Early 2012 The Pirate Bay went even further when it decided to cease offering torrent files for well-seeded content. The site’s operators moved to magnet links instead, allowing them to save resources and making it easier for third-party sites to run proxies.

These proxies turned out to be much-needed, as The Pirate Bay is now the most broadly censored website on the Internet. In recent years ISPs in Denmark, Italy, UK, the Netherlands and elsewhere have been ordered by courts to block access to the BitTorrent site. Earlier this year The Pirate Bay estimated that at least 8% of their visitors are now accessing the site through proxies.

Late last year The Pirate Bay made another change to improve its resilience by switching their entire operation to the cloud. Serving its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world saves costs, guarantees better uptime, and makes the site more portable and thus harder to take down.

The final change to the site’s operation came a few months ago. Fearing a domain seizure by the Swedish authorities, TPB took action again. After hearing the rumors The Pirate Bay quickly switched to a Greenland-based domain, later hopping to Iceland, and eventually landing .SX domains as other problems became apparent.

Despite numerous court cases, court-ordered blockades by ISPs and two full trials at the Stockholm Court, The Pirate Bay remains online. In fact, it is still one of the most-visited websites on the Internet and the number of users continues to grow.

As for the future, it is expected that the legal pressure will continue and increase. In recent years copyright holders have focused more on targeting the site’s hosting facilities, domain registrars and advertisers. Whether that will be good enough to bring the site to its knees remains to be seen.